9.3Votes for women

The long campaign for women's suffrage reached its climax in these years. Building on the movement launched at Seneca Falls decades earlier, a new generation of activists organized marches, lobbying, and civil disobedience. Western states led the way, granting women the vote before the nation did.

Women's contributions during World War I strengthened the argument that they deserved full citizenship. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment prohibited denying the vote on the basis of sex, enfranchising millions of women nationwide. It was the largest single expansion of democracy in American history to that point—though in practice, many women of color, especially in the South, remained blocked from voting.